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Bravo! Vail: Gilbert Conducts Gershwin and Julia Adolphe

Location

Gerald R. Ford AmphitheaterVail, Colorado

Date & Times

Wednesday, 6:00 PM

Event Info

Ticket packages (and, starting April 18, single tickets) are available from the Bravo! Vail Box Office at bravovail.org or (877) 812-5700. Box Office hours are 9:00AM to 4:00PM. (MDT), Monday through Friday.

Program

Julia Adolphe

Gershwin

After Walter Damrosch saw the legendary Paul Whiteman conduct Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924), he commissioned the young composer to write a “proper” piano concerto. The result was the full-fledged, 3-movement Concerto in F. Gershwin was known primarily as a jazz composer with an innate sense of what would please an audience. Despite claiming (with tongue in cheek) that after receiving Damrosch’s commission, he bought “four or five books on musical structure to find out exactly what the concerto form really was,” Gershwin was no stranger to subjects like orchestration, harmony, and musical forms. Still, to someone who spent his life questing after respect from the “serious” music establishment, the assignment was daunting. Unlike the Rhapsody in Blue, which was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, Gershwin orchestrated the Concerto in F himself. Originally commissioned as the New York Concerto, Gershwin gave it a title that would sound more “classical.” He was the soloist and Walter Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony (i.e., Philharmonic) at the Carnegie Hall premiere in 1925. The reception by classical music traditionalists was less than kind, but the general audience response was enthusiastic. Gershwin provided some commentary on his piece: “The first movement employs the Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young and enthusiastic spirit of American life…The second movement has a poetic nocturnal atmosphere…The final movement reverts to the style of the first. It is an orgy of rhythms, starting violently and keeping to the same pace throughout.” The influence of 1920s jazz is clearly there, including a bluesy trumpet melody in the slow movement, but so are lovely lyrical passages for strings, lively percussion, and above all, jubilant tunes. A wonderful amalgam of European sensibilities and American freedom and panache, the Concerto is a concert favorite that speaks in America’s musical vernacular: jazz.

Dvořák

Early in his tenure in America Antonín Dvořák composed his beloved New World Symphony. A strong advocate of indigenous forms as inspiration for art music, he wrote: “Since I have been in this country I have been deeply interested in the national music of the Negroes and the Indians. The character, the very nature of a race, is contained in its national music. For that reason my attention was at once turned in the direction of these native melodies…. It is this spirit which I have tried to reproduce in my new Symphony … I have not actually used any of the melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the music and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, harmony, counterpoint and orchestral color.” Filled with hummable melodies, bold horns calls, and an unforgettable, ever-present theme, the Ninth also evokes the native sounds of his homeland, perhaps an expression of his homesickness for his native Bohemia.

Artists

Anne-Marie McDermott

Anne-Marie McDermott

Piano

Piano

For more than 25 years pianist Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. She also serves as artistic director of the Bravo! Vail and Ocean Reef music festivals, and as curator for chamber music for the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego.

Ms. McDermott’s repertoire ranges from J.S. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven as well as Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, to works by today’s most influential composers. In the 2015–16 season she appeared with the Dallas, Nashville, and Pacific symphony orchestras, and premiered Poul Ruders’s new concerto with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra — a piece she will record alongside Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Charles Wuorinen’s last solo piano sonata, which she has recorded, was written for her and premiered at New York’s Town Hall. This season Ms. McDermott participates in the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s all-Gershwin Silver Jubilee Celebration, and embarks on a cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos at Santa Fe Pro Musica.

She has recorded the complete Prokofiev piano sonatas, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas, solo works by Chopin, Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and Mozart piano concertos with the Calder Quartet. Most recently she recorded piano sonatas and concertos by Haydn with Denmark’s Odense Philharmonic, with two Wuorinen-penned cadenzas.

She has performed and toured with leading orchestras — including the New York Philharmonic; Minnesota Orchestra; and Dallas, Seattle, National, Houston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Atlanta symphony orchestras — and has toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.

She is a longtime member of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and tours as a member of OPUS ONE, a chamber group with Ida Kavafian, Steven Tenenbom, and Peter Wiley that has commissioned more than 15 new works. She also tours annually with violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and performs in a trio with her sisters, cellist Maureen and New York Philharmonic violinist Kerry.

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